


Rain Down

by lilacsigil



Category: The Defenders (Marvel TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Cameos, Case Fic, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Murder, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:28:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27523861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: Recovering from her head injury, Madani is stuck on desk duty when Karen Page tries to get information out of her. Madani follows Karen's story further than she means to, unsure if she is fighting or protecting Karen.Non-graphic mentions of child pornography, child abuse and violence.
Relationships: Dinah Madani/Karen Page
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	Rain Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shopfront](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shopfront/gifts).



Madani's alarm startled her awake at 5 am on a bleak, grey morning. It gave her a headache, but what didn't right now? She went to the bathroom without turning on the light: her pair of black eyes had now faded to purple, red and a sickly yellow-green that she really didn't want to look at right now. Gym clothes on, and out to the elevator. Her medical assessment was at the end of this week and she'd be damned if she was going to fail it. Deskwork, and not being allowed to so much as look sideways at anything important, was driving her insane faster than the enforced rest after Russo's shot to the head had. 

She tried not to think about Russo, lying quietly in his well-guarded hospital bed. She'd already attempted to get in and question him, but her boss Hernandez had briefed the guards to call him when she showed up. Once she was back on active duty, Hernandez would have no cause to stop her. The medical reports all said Russo was semi-catatonic from brain trauma, but she didn't believe that for a second. Nobody else in her department understood how dangerous Russo was: they thought she'd been fooled by a pretty face, but Madani was no fool. Russo had been smart enough to get past her guard, and she couldn't forgive that. 

Speaking of pretty faces, Karen Page was sitting casually on the chest press bench, sipping a coffee. She was wearing a pants suit today, her pale blue shirt casually open at the neck.

"This is meant to be a secure building," Madani snapped, throwing her towel on one of the treadmills, without taking her eyes of Karen. 

Karen smiled, pushing her hair aside. "Your doorman loves me."

"Whatever you want, go ask someone else." 

"So you don't want to hear about a serving member of the Coast Guard found dead this morning?"

Of course Madani did – and to know how Karen knew about it. "Nope."

"Single gunshot wound to the throat."

"I'd think that would be more your department." She jumped on the treadmill and started running, though she knew it wasn't going to drown out Karen's voice.

Karen threw her head back and laughed. "You mean the shooting or the vigilante stuff? Honestly, I don't know what's going on, but you're my only friendly face at Homeland Security. And you know what they say, always talk to your sources before they've had coffee."

Madani cast her a look that was the exact opposite of friendly and Karen raised her hands in mock surrender.

"Okay, I get it. You know where to find me if there's anything you guys want leaked."

She took her coffee, unfolded her long frame from the low bench, and walked out the door. Madani was pleased: now she'd be able to concentrate on her workout.

By 9am, Madani was in the conference room for the morning briefing. People were still casting her odd looks on the street, so she didn't think the heavy-duty concealer was working as well as her mother claimed it would. At least everyone at work was used to the outward signs of her injuries and knew not to ask her about it.

Hernandez hurried in, an uncharacteristic few minutes late, with an armful of folders. 

"All right, good morning, any news on the smuggling op, O'Brien?" 

O'Brien, a tall man recently out of the army, briefed the group and Madani resisted the urge to tap her pencil against the desk. O'Brien was very thorough, to the point of frustration. He was building a good case, but the smugglers were going to up and vanish soon, and they'd miss the big fish. Her contributions weren't currently welcome, though, so she kept her mouth shut.

At the very end of the meeting, Hernandez handed her one of his folders. 

"Will you liaise with the NYPD on this one? One of our guys was killed last night. Off duty, nothing to indicate terrorism or security breach, so the ball's in their court." He fixed her with a hard look over the top of his glasses. "And it's staying there. I don't want complaints that you're down there taking over the investigation. In fact, I don't want to hear that you're down there at all. Desk duty until you're cleared to return, remember?"

"Yes, sir," Madani replied, with a slight quirk of her lip. Hernandez would know she was pleased to having something to do and all that warning was unnecessary. 

Reading through the report at her desk, Madani fought an immediate urge to head down to the scene. She shook her head: Hernandez knew her too well. The case was the dead Coastguardsman that Karen had attempted to interrogate her about this morning. Warrant Officer Russell Shawn, 46, had been found dead in a parking lot near housing project towers in Brooklyn. He lived in an apartment building two blocks away, and had done so all his life, with the exception of Coast Guard assignments. He'd lived there at first with his mother but for the last decade alone, since she'd passed away. As Karen had said, he'd been shot once, in the throat. He'd been found deceased by police officers called to the scene by reports of multiple gunshots. Shawn had been quickly identified as he had his wallet on him, and he had a gun in his hand. 

"Whose gun?" Madani asked in frustration, but there was no further information in the file. "Did he fire it? Why multiple gunshots?" 

A very polite call to the detective responsible – seated at her desk so that she could obediently wave to Hernandez as he went by – turned up a little more information. Shawn's gun was his service weapon, he had fired it, but there was no trace of a second body, or, after heavy rain, blood. 

"The victim was probably buying drugs," Detective Goode said, already writing her own narrative. "It's a popular spot for it. Don't see a lot of white people there otherwise. Everyone heard the gunshots but nobody saw anything. I don't expect anyone's memories to suddenly improve."

Madani made a note to access Shawn's medical files – he would have had frequent drug tests as an active service member. "Anything else notable? Any regular dealers missing?"

"Who the hell knows? Oh, yeah, there was one thing – there was a USB drive in the guy's mouth."

"What's on it?" Madani had Shawn's file open now. He was an electronics specialist based out of Staten Island with a long history of minor disciplinary matters. The kind of guy who found his level early and stuck there until retirement. Clean drug tests with the occasional exception of blood alcohol content. 

"We tried to open it but it's encrypted. It's with the tech guys now, they've got about a month's backlog."

Madani smiled, because she believed people could hear when you were smiling on the phone. "Why don't you send it over to Homeland Security? We've got plenty of data analysts and no backlog."

Detective Goode brightened considerably. "Awesome, great. You guys aren't going to take over, are you?" She sounded hopeful. "I've got plenty to do without some stupid-ass drug deal clogging up my caseload."

She thought about it for a moment – real work to do! – but considered Hernandez's reaction and shook her head. "No, you've got jurisdiction. My boss doesn't want him either."

Details exchanged, Madani waited on tenterhooks for the USB drive to be sent over. Honestly, she thought the detective was probably right and Shawn had indeed been buying drugs at the start of his rostered week off, but an encrypted USB drive in his mouth was a weird detail. 

The drive showed up less than an hour later. Madani signed for it, then took it to the cyber intelligence team. 

"Give it to Haddad," the SAC told her. "He'll be glad of something to do other than read terrorist chat logs."

"Thank you!" Haddad took the USB drive. "Some actual computing, at last."

Madani grinned. "Yeah, took me a few years to get away from the chat servers, too. 90% of it was horny guys trying to get laid. Put me off ever dating someone who speaks Farsi in case they start talking 'sexy' like the guys on those servers."

Haddad laughed. "Algeria's no different! You think we could solve terrorism by getting them all girlfriends? Okay, your USB drive is encrypted, but it's a standard commercial program. We've got the key to that one. Give me a minute and…there you go."

He clicked one of the many folders at random. It was full of images, and when Haddad opened one, it was child pornography. A little girl, with a man who was clearly a younger Shawn standing behind her.

"Oh, shit," Haddad said, and closed the file. "I didn't want to see that. There's hundreds of files on here, and if this is a consistent filename protocol, they go back years."

"Sorry, I had no idea." Madani took back the USB drive. "I'm going to have to report this to the NYPD. Any of that work you did on it classified?"

"No, it'll just look like we cracked the code." Haddad looked like he was going to throw up.

Madani returned to his boss. "It was child porn – let the poor guy take a break and make sure you organise him counselling," 

"Well, fuck. You ask for a favour and mess up my techs? You owe me one, Madani."

"Sure, sure," she said as she hurried back upstairs. Everyone owed tech favours, and they rarely called them in. She was glad now that she had decided to follow Hernandez's rules and keep everything official. She'd been pondering giving the drive to David Lieberman if Homeland Security couldn't get anything out of it. She shook her head, intensifying her headache. Shit. This wasn't some grand conspiracy; it was some drug-taking pedophile scumbag who happened to be in the Coast Guard. 

Something about that phrasing made her stop and think. Someone like Russell Shawn would be a prime target for vigilantes – he'd gotten away with his crimes for a long time, he was an apparently upstanding member of society with no criminal record – and of course, there was Karen Page, reporter specialising in vigilantes, having the details before the NYPD or Homeland Security did. 

She had truly meant to stay at her desk, or at least in the building, she found herself walking towards the Bulletin offices anyway. It was raining on and off, and people were huddled in their coats, but Madani found it refreshing. She'd always liked the rain in New York – in any big city – briefly washing the air clean. It was less dramatic here than in, say, Kabul or Tehran, but as she walked across town, raindrops in her hair and on her face, she felt lighter than she had since she woke up in hospital and realised she was alive. Even her headache receded.

Instinct made her glance at the coffee shop across the street from the Bulletin offices and catch a glimpse of Karen's gleaming hair as she flicked it back while she laughed, sitting at a table with two other women and a bearded man. Slipping quietly into the shop behind two men in bulky overcoats, she took the table behind Karen and waited to see how long it would take before Karen noticed she was being watched. The coffee shop was warm with breath and loud with conversation and the clatter of keyboards, but Karen turned around within a minute. 

"Hey," she said to Madani. "Nice to see you so soon!" She slid from her table to a seat at Madani's, bringing the remains of her sandwich with her and signalling the waitress for more coffee.

"I thought you liked interrogating people before coffee," Madani frowned but took the drink anyway, stirring in sugar. 

"Let's be on the same level this time."

Madani leaned forward, glaring at Karen. "On the same level? Only if you tell me what you know about this Coast Guard case. How did you find out about it so fast? Is it…" She didn't finish the sentence, not wanting to say Frank Castle's name out loud. "Or maybe another one of your friends."

Karen shook her head. "No, not him. Nobody that I know. But I got a tip-off about why, exactly, someone might want to take justice into their own hands regarding Russell Shawn, and as far as I can tell, the cops haven't got onto that yet."

"They have now," Madani growled, then snapped her mouth shut. 

Karen didn't look like she was gloating, as Madani might have expected. "Okay. Good. Then I'm guessing you've got some clean-up on your hands, too. Do you think your superiors will let it come out about his kiddie porn? Or will they protect him?"

"I don't think he had a lot of friends, but you never know with the military who's going to cover whose ass. Which makes me wonder, who tipped you off about him then acted so fast that you came to me rather than trying to expose him yourself? You might hero-worship vigilantes, but I've noticed you're just as fond of conducting trial by publicity."

"My tip-off came after he was dead, but I can tell you that he at least injured the other party involved," Karen told her. 

"You're not telling the detective this?"

Karen made a face. "Detective Goode is not a big fan of mine. I'm pretty sure she was on Fisk's payroll, but I've never been able to prove it. She's not the type to protect some dead pedophile, but I wouldn't trust her to actually bother solving the case." Her grimace turned into a smile, her face bright. "Let alone feed me any information if she does find something."

"Oh, this is a quid pro quo arrangement, is it?" Madani smiled, too. "We'll see about that. Remember I'm supposed to still be riding a desk at the moment."

"I don't think that would stop you." Karen's phone beeped, and she glanced at it, then back at Madani. "Gotta go. See you round, Dinah."

She was out of her seat and out the door before Madani even opened her mouth to say goodbye. 

By evening, Madani's headache was back in full. Detective Goode's interest in solving the case had, as Karen predicted, dropped even further with the news that her victim was a pedophile. At least the NYPD's computer crime squad had been more receptive, sending investigators to Shawn's apartment, though they hadn't found anything so far. The Coast Guard, too, were checking all systems that Shawn had accessed, in case he'd been using their systems for illegal activity. The city morgue had been recalcitrant about sending her information about fresh bodies with gunshot wounds, and calling around the hospitals hadn't been any more rewarding. Every step felt like something she should be doing in person, rather than delegating or wheedling over the phone. She hadn't even seen the body, let alone found the second person Karen had mentioned!

The only person who seemed pleased with her day's work was Hernandez. As he left for the evening he gave her a thumbs up. "Desk duty, as ordered! Well done!"

"Yeah, yeah, I live to obey," she replied, taking the role of petulant child that he was assigning her in this dynamic. 

She was on the subway and halfway to Hell's Kitchen before she consciously acknowledged where she was going. Karen Page held the key to this part of the mystery, to which vigilante had killed Shawn and why. Even if she didn't know yet who it was, there had been information passed to her, and desperate people didn't stop at a single message. They'd contacted a sympathetic journalist to get their story out, and the story was instead disappearing into a morass of uninterested law enforcement and department bureaucracy. Sure, it would look better to have the case wrapped up in a neat bow – and at least a pedophile was no longer able to hurt anyone – but there were threads dangling from that neat bow. Karen had some idea what they were, but Madani didn't, and in her experience it was always the most vulnerable who were left out of those neatly completed stories: the foot soldiers, the Afghans under occupation, the sex workers, the families left behind.

When she alighted, it wasn't near the New York Bulletin, but a few stops later, near Karen's apartment. Madani hadn't been there herself, but she had the address and a report from when they had been searching for Frank Castle. Karen lived alone, in a not particularly secure older building; the place had been shot up during Castle's trial last year. It started to rain again, and Madani turned up her collar, standing under an awning across the street, in shadows and hard to spot. 

Karen got home not long after, but she was in and out before Madani had made up her mind to approach her: she'd changed out of the pants suit and pale blue shirt of earlier today into jeans and a heavy, navy blue, wool coat. Her hair was in a ponytail and she tucked it up under a knit cap. She wasn't carrying her bag anymore, but the coat was bulky enough to hide a dozen weapons if she had wanted to. Karen was definitely on the move, and Madani was on her tail.

Karen took a couple of phone calls as she walked, and she was definitely alert, though not so much that Madani couldn't avoid her scrutiny. Being short was a tremendous advantage, for once, though she did realise how much she'd relied on seeing Karen's highly visible blonde hair to spot her at a distance. Dressed as she was, Karen blended well with everyone else hurrying from place to place in the clinging rain. 

Around a corner, Karen had stopped dead against a fence, out of the flow of people, and for a moment Madani thought she'd been made. But no, Karen had pulled off a glove to rapidly text someone, frowning as she did. She waited for an answer while Madani hid behind a pair of dudebros complaining about some girl who wasn't paying them the attention they thought they deserved. Good for her, Madani thought, then Karen was moving again, changing direction. 

Madani hadn't been to this specific street before but she recognised it from Karen's dossier – it was the location of the law firm where she'd worked when she first met Castle, before joining the Bulletin. Maybe she was checking her legal position on her informant? 

Karen did indeed enter the building with the law firm, brushing her fingers over a bronze plaque by the door, and headed upstairs. 

"Karen! Good to see you!" A man's voice rang out, and whatever Karen said in return was muffled by the closing of a door. Madani hovered for a few minutes, then headed into the apartment building across the way. The door was closed but the lock looked like it had been busted for a while. There was a queue for the single elevator, so Madani took the stairs up to the third floor, where a grimy window at the end of the hall gave her a great view down into the well-lit law office. 

Karen was sitting at a table piled high with papers; the man to her left was Franklin Nelson, who had recently made a popular but failed run for DA, so the one on her right must be Matt Murdock. He was wearing dark glasses, and Madani remembered that he was blind, but it still gave her a slight start when he tilted his head to the side as if he was looking right at her. The two men were eating out of takeaway boxes, and Karen had a mug in her hand. Murdock leaned forward and said something quietly to Karen, then Murdock grabbed Nelson's forearm at the same time as Karen made a "stop" gesture in his face. 

Madani ducked back against the window frame, instinct moving faster than her conscious brain: her nervous system was telling her she'd been made, even though there was no way at this angle, in this lighting. Murdock or Karen had spotted her, and were warning Nelson against looking for their watcher. She frowned: Karen wouldn't be able to see out her own window into the dark and rain, let alone up another floor through grimy plexiglass. When she forced herself to ignore the raised hairs on the back of her neck, she looked back down to see Karen showing Nelson something on her phone, the three of them all laughing again. Madani frowned. That was not the behaviour of people who'd spotted someone spying on them. The enforced recovery time and limited duties were throwing off her instincts, for sure. She didn't want to think that it might be the head injury itself, and consoled herself that it seemed unlikely, considering her balance and vision were completely fine. 

An hour or so later, Karen put her coat back on and headed out. Madani followed her, annoyed at her inability to decide whether her instincts had been affected or not. Thirty minutes later, Madani was clenching her teeth in frustration, because all signs were pointing her to being completely off-base in following Karen. Karen had gone to a bookshop, talked to a street poet about organising an interview, sat at a communal table to have a huge mug of soup for dinner while reading one of her new books, got a few groceries, and headed home. Apart from sending a few text messages, she did absolutely nothing that Madani would expect from a reporter on an active vigilante story, someone who had dressed in dark, practical clothes and checked for a tail. Had she been so wrong? 

Fuck it, she thought. Everything holding her back right now was to do with her job, with Hernandez: Karen was the way forward. If she couldn't trust herself to know that, she shouldn't be going back to work, she shouldn't be allowed to go back. Russo had fooled her and lied to her and tried to kill her, but he hadn't broken her trust in herself. Karen knew more than she was telling, and she wanted, on some level, to bring Madani in on it. 

The lock on Karen's apartment door was new and took Madani longer than she expected to pick, especially as what she really wanted was to kick it in. Finally it clicked open and she silently pushed the door open. 

"Keep your hands where I can see them," Karen said from the dark apartment, her voice flat. "You can't see me, but you're perfectly framed by the hall light. Wait, Madani?"

Madani kept her hands up. "Yes, it's me."

"Fuck! I could have shot you! You're the one following me?"

Karen flicked the lights on and Madani took a moment to adjust, longer than she should have. That was definitely an effect of the head injury; she was going to make a mental note to practise that before the medical, but she was distracted by Karen. She was still dressed in a long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, but her hair was out of the ponytail and spilling over her shoulders and arms, reflecting the soft glow of the suspended light overhead. Her workday make-up had been cleaned off, and all her freckles were visible, unknown constellations across the planes of her face. Her feet were bare. 

Madani had hardly even looked at the gun, until Karen slammed it down on the table. "Damn it, Dinah, why were you following me?"

"How did you even know I was there?" She ground her teeth slightly in annoyance: Karen had been leading her all the way back here.

Karen stood up, the dangling light now shining from behind her head so that Madani had to narrow her eyes to keep her gaze on her face. 

"I have a lot of friends in Hell's Kitchen, and that's all I'm willing to say about that."

Madani nodded. Of course. That was where Karen's vigilante sympathiser career had started, after all. "I asked you for help, you gave me nothing useful. What do you expect me to do?"

"It's not my fault you're stuck behind a desk! Russo shot you!"

"Fuck you!" Madani spat, at the sound of that name on Karen's lips. "You don't know anything about me!"

"I know more than you think," Karen managed to get out, before Madani launched herself at her, gripping the forearm closest to the gun. 

"What do you think you know?" 

They were face-to-face now, Karen glaring down at Madani as she tried and failed to twist her arm free. 

"I know that you care, which is more than you can say for the rest of fucking Homeland Security!" Karen's face was lit up with anger.

"I'm not your insider! We might be aligned on this one case but it's not because you bought me with intel."

"Let me go!" Karen demanded, but Madani didn't release her hold, not with the gun right there on the table. "Let me go," she said again, then hauled back her left hand and slapped Madani's face with a loud crack. 

Madani reacted instinctively and grabbed Karen's other arm as well, driving her backwards until she fell onto her sofa, Madani on top of her. Karen looked up for a moment, her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed, then leaned up and kissed Madani square on the mouth. Madani pinned Karen's arms above her head, over the arm of the sofa and straddled her body to kiss her back. 

Her small breasts were right in Karen's face, and Karen, unable to use her hands, made the most of it, getting her face right into Madani's cleavage and licking a long stripe up the side of her breast. Madani let herself sink down a little to rub herself against the belt of Karen's jeans, the buckle hard against her sensitive clit. 

"Let me go," Karen murmured, but she wasn't struggling to escape, instead pressing her body upwards against Madani; Madani bent down and kissed her long, pale neck, grazing her skin with her teeth. 

Karen groaned and managed to pull one of her hands free, only to shove it down the front of her jeans to get herself off. Her wrist snaked under Madani and she pressed herself even harder against the new stimulus. Madani's head was swimming and she didn't know how this had got out of control so fast, but her senses and every nerve were focused only on Karen as she writhed beneath her, her body taut like a bow.

For several long moments their bodies pulsed together, heartbeats equally fast, before Madani collapsed onto Karen's chest. Karen let out a long breath, ruffling Madani's curls. The throbbing at the side of Madani's face where Karen had slapped her matched with the throbbing of the rest of her body, and her shirt was sticking to her back with sweat. 

"Wow," Karen said quietly. 

"Just don't think I'm going to be your source now." Madani meant to sound warning, but it came out sleepy. "I've been there already and I'm not doing it again."

Karen sat straight up, tipping Madani off her and almost off the sofa. "Are you comparing me to Billy Russo? Because there's no way."

Madani glared at her. "To Russo? Don't even think you'd get anything out of me!"

"Oh is that what this is? Well, fuck you, Dinah, and fuck off!"

That was not what Madani had intended at all, but her temper fired up immediately. "I know you've already made up your mind about me and everyone I work with. If you think we're so terrible, why did you give me that intel? And why am I here?"

"That's you, not the whole department!"

Madani grabbed her coat from the floor and put it back on. "Don't call me."

She had to fumble with the lock for a moment, rather spoiling her exit, but slammed the door behind her for emphasis. Who did Karen think she was?

By the time she made it into the cold air outside, Madani was calming down. Sure, she found Karen attractive: who wouldn't? That didn't mean she needed to be at Karen's beck and call, or pay any more attention to her tip-offs than she would to any other random person off the street. The fact that Karen had connections to Frank Castle and to the Hell's Kitchen man in the mask didn't mean she knew every vigilante, did it? She was so angry at herself for letting that argument turn into sex. The fallout with Russo had her second-guessing her every action: it had been amazing to simply let go for once and roll with what was happening, but no, she had to let Russo wreck that too. 

She paced the other side of the street, her hair slicked to her head with rain, thinking about going to the hospital and finishing Russo off. Before she made up her mind, an Uber pulled up in front of Karen's building, and Karen hurried out and got in. Karen was wearing the same clothes she had been earlier, the jeans and knit cap and big coat – her clothes for sneaking around. "Always talk to your sources before they've had coffee," Karen had said, and Madani had turned that around on her: not literally before coffee, but emotionally volatile. 

Madani jogged along the block after the Uber and, when they reached Tenth Avenue, flagged down a cab. 

"Follow that silver Toyota," she told the driver, giving him a fifty as incentive. 

"Sure thing," he said, "Where we headed?"

"Don't know yet. Try to stay a car or two behind." 

"You a P.I. or something?"

Madani pulled her badge. "Homeland Security."

The driver turned a sickly shade under his dark skin and said not another word. 

It didn't surprise Madani that they were headed for Brooklyn and the housing projects where this had all started. Away from Hell's Kitchen, good: she still didn't know how Karen had spotted her, but from her reaction it was clearly a localised phenomenon. Madani would be out of her comfort zone here – she was deliberately not thinking about the sleep she was supposed to be getting now, or being at the office tomorrow – but so would Karen. She was going to find the missing parts of this story, and see what Karen was hiding. She mentally called up the maps she'd looked at earlier, of Shawn's apartment and the projects, the empty lot where his body had been found. Karen's car turned off before they reached the empty lot, stopping at a grimy but busy 24-hour diner. Karen got out, and Madani signalled her driver to stop. 

"Do you want me to wait?" he said hesitantly, glancing around the rundown neighbourhood. 

"No, go," Madani told him, shoving the fare at him, and with a look of immense relief, he did. 

The diner was a long, skinny building with mismatched chairs at tables where the laminate was worn down to the wood beneath in places. It was busy even near midnight, and smelled of greasy food and body spray, a dozen or so teenagers hanging about near the front and pretending not to care about each other's attentions. There was a hubbub of conversation but with the roaring of the struggling extractor fans and 80s music playing over that, it was hard to make out any actual words. The only white people there were a group of old Russian men playing an elaborate card game up the back, and Karen at a table eating fries with two African American girls. The older girl looked pissed off, but the younger one, wearing Karen's knit cap, looked pleased with herself. 

Madani dropped into the booth kitty-corner to them, and listened hard. 

"So Turk said I should talk to you two about Russell Shawn. Which one of you is Rachelle and which one is Jade?"

"I'm Rachelle," said the older girl, who looked about thirteen. "So Mr Shawn and his friend, they used to take pictures of us. And do stuff, sometimes. He'd give us candy and stuff, and said if we told anyone he'd kill us and our grandma too. But this is when we were little, and later we got sent to foster care."

"For years and years," Jade spoke for the first time.

"Because our grandma died and Mom was in jail. But Mom got out of jail and got an apartment and then we were allowed to go back with her. So we moved back here last month and then we saw Mr Shawn again. He was talking to some other kids. But now we know that's child molesting and that's wrong. And it's his fault, not ours." 

Madani had seen kids react like this before, kids from war zones who had been told they hadn't done anything wrong and that everything would be okay, and could parrot the words without really believing them.

"It's not your fault," Karen said, reinforcing Rachelle's doubt-filled claims. "You were just little kids. Have you seen Mr Shawn's friend again?"

Rachelle shook her head. "No. Anyway, so our mom's got a boyfriend, your friend Turk. We heard him complaining about how much he hates pedos, and how many there were in jail when he was there, and how he should totally kill them, so me and Jade told him about Mr Shawn." 

Karen nodded. "But instead of killing Shawn, Turk got hold of his USB drive and set up a meeting to blackmail him?"

"The USB drive was all messed up." Jade frowned. "It needed a password."

"My friend Dinah can fix that," Karen assured her. "So Shawn thought nobody else was there and shot Turk, but Turk managed to get a shot off in return. Is that right?"

"We were there," Rachelle said, viciously stabbing a fry into the ketchup on her plate. "We wanted to see him kill Mr Shawn. And we did. Then I took the USB drive off Turk and put it right in Mr Shawn's mouth so the cops would find it."

Having seen a few of the photographs, Madani could understand why the victim of this pedophile would think of putting the drive in his mouth, in particular. It wasn't an image she particularly wanted in her mind, and she took a moment to replace it with the image of Shawn's body on a morgue table. 

"How's Turk, by the way?" Karen asked. 

Jade shrugged. "He's good. Got a friend who's a nurse, she fixed him up. Turk's got lots of friends, you know. I like him. You're his friend, too." She slurped up the last of her milkshake through her straw. 

"I don't know if I'd go that far," Karen said dubiously. "But I did save his life once. Did he tell you that? Is that why you called me?"

"Nope, I called you because it said 'Reporter' under your name and I want people to know what Mr Shawn did because it's wrong. I want it on TV. Everyone knows it's wrong, why did he get to do it to us?" Rachelle kicked the table leg and the scattered salt on her plate jumped into the air. 

"My friend I told you about, Dinah, has the USB drive and she's found evidence on it of what he did. But my friend in the police said that they didn't find anything else at his house. Do you know where Turk got the USB drive?"

Rachelle nodded. "But Turk said not to go there."

"What if I come with you?"

"Okay. But Jade has to come too, because Mom's at work tonight and I'm babysitting."

"I guess you're already up late on a school night," Karen told them, not sounding like she particularly cared about that. Madani had to slump down into the corner of her booth as they filed out past her. The diner was busy enough that it took her a moment to get out the door, and it was only a flash of Karen's fair hair under a flickering streetlight that let her see what direction they had gone. 

Madani didn't know who this Turk guy was, but Karen didn't seem worried about him, or that he would face prosecution for killing Shawn. She wasn't sure whether to call this Karen's reporter side – focused on the story – or her vigilante side – focused on justice. Either way, they were a long way from Hell's Kitchen, and whoever protected Karen there: here, there was only Madani watching over her. She'd meant to feel proud of herself for prodding Karen into action in a way that Madani could follow, to find out her secrets, but instead she was worried. Not because this was a rough neighbourhood – Karen was armed and capable – but because this Turk guy seemed to have few qualms about exposing the girls to danger, and yet he'd told them to stay away from wherever they were headed now. 

Whether it was Madani's determined stance as she walked or the taxi driver had warned people that she was Homeland Security, nobody bothered her as she followed Karen away from the diner and around the west side of the housing project towers, past the police tape around the empty lot where Shawn had died, to one of the self-storage facilities that were common in relatively cheap areas like this one. It had a fence but there was a large gap that Karen and the girls ducked through, into the rows and rows of identical tilt-slab concrete storage units with locked, bright orange roller doors. The aisles between were large enough for a small truck, and everything was harshly lit, making the shadows between the storage units even darker. Madani had to take a parallel aisle, because it would be too easy for Karen to glance back and see her if she followed closely. 

"Is this it?" Karen asked the girls. "1891?"

"Yeah, but Turk has these cool keys that open nearly everything," Rachelle told her, and Madani added illegal use of a bump key to her fictional list of charges for Turk.

"Got something like that myself," Karen said.

Listening to Karen get the padlock open, Madani heard the scrape of someone moving. She couldn't immediately locate it the strange echoes of this artificial maze, but she backed up into the shadow of a recessed roller door, alert. 

The roller door went up: Karen must have got the lock open. "It's all his computer gear," she said. "No wonder they didn't find anything at his apartment. Good work, Rachelle."

"Freeze, bitch!" A man's voice rang out, but he wasn't talking to Madani: he was in the next aisle across, with Karen and the girls. 

"You can see my hands," Karen told him, sounding perfectly calm. "Girls, get behind me, please."

"None of you fucking move!" 

"You're Mr Shawn's friend!" Jade's voice was shaking. 

"Shouldn't have said that, kid. Now you're all going to have to go down."

"Hey, I'm not a cop," Karen kept talking. "I can't arrest anyone here. I'm a reporter. I want to hear what's really happening. The real story of Russell Shawn."

To Madani's astonishment, it seemed to be working, at least enough to buy time. 

"Russ was a good guy!" the other man complained. "You can't believe anything those lying little bitches say."

"You're a friend of Russell's, okay, are you in the Coast Guard too? Is that how you know each other?"

"I got invalided out, couple of years back, but yeah."

That wasn't good – he'd know how to handle himself in a fight, and be at least competent with his weapon. Madani could only hope that whatever medical reason he'd had to leave, plus the element of surprise, would be enough to save them all. She crept up to the next crossways path and moved slowly and quietly into the right aisle to take up position behind the man. He was a big guy, both muscular and fat, and had taken a solid stance with his weapon pointed at Karen, not wavering despite their ongoing conversation. Karen had her right hand resting casually over her coat pocket, and Madani assumed that's where her gun was. Madani, of course, was unarmed, having surrendered her weapon for the duration of her hospitalisation and desk duty. The only improvised weapon she could see nearby was a fire extinguisher, but retrieving it would make too much noise.

Karen must have seen Madani, but her gaze never wavered from the man's face as she encouraged him to talk. "So you stayed in touch after that? Do you live near here too?"

The two girls had sensibly dropped to the ground and were making themselves as small as possible: they already knew how to handle themselves around guns. Madani took a deep breath and ran at the armed man. 

She leapt at his trigger-hand's elbow with her entire body weight hanging off his arm, dragging it outwards and away from Karen and the girls. She got a hand over the gun, but her overhand grip wasn't strong enough to twist the weapon away from him.

"Fuck!" the man shouted, but, with military discipline, didn't try to fire when he couldn't aim. Madani slammed both her feet into the back of his knee and calf to try to drop him to the ground, and he staggered forward, but didn't go down. Madani was still in control of his gun arm, at least. 

The man somehow kept his balance and tried to shake Madani free of his arm, but she braced her feet against his body and clung on, even when he smashed her into the concrete wall and stole the breath from her body. If she let go of his gun hand, it was all over. 

"Don't you fucking move or I'll blow your fucking head off!" Karen had her gun out now, and was a safe few steps back, aiming straight at the man. 

"Hey, there's no need…" the man trailed off at his sudden reversal of fortune. 

"Great. Now let go of your gun so my friend can take it." Karen didn't gesture with the gun like an amateur. She held it entirely steady. 

"He's not letting go," Madani informed her, still hanging off his arm, pulling the gun away from Karen. She could taste blood in her mouth. 

"You've got five seconds. Four. Three. Two."

"All right!" He let go of the gun and Madani wrenched it away from him. In one last desperate move, he turned faster than Madani would have thought he could and tried to grab her by the throat. She blocked his attempt with her forearm and a shot rang out. 

The man collapsed to the floor with a groan and Madani jumped backwards. 

"Is he dead?" Karen asked, though she didn't sound particularly interested in the answer. 

Madani checked: Karen had shot him cleanly through the shoulder as he lunged for Madani, and he was bleeding badly, but not dead. With a sigh, Madani removed her jacket and balled it up against the wound. "Call 911?"

"They won't come here." Rachelle seemed untroubled by yet another shooting in front of her. 

"They will for me," Madani replied, and Karen brought her phone over for Madani to call it in. 

Karen sighed as the two girls avidly stared at the wounded man. "Rachelle, take your sister home now, okay? You don't need to be here when the police arrive. I'll make sure your story gets out."

"You better," Rachelle told her, but she took Jade's hand and led her away.

An hour later, Shawn's pedophile buddy had been taken away in an ambulance under police guard, Madani had been checked out by an ambulance crew, and Detective Goode was complaining about being called out at midnight. 

"God, you'd think she'd get a different job if she didn't want to be up all hours," Karen muttered to Madani as they sat side-by-side on the ambulance step. 

"What, like a journalist?"

"I was thinking a desk job at Homeland Security, actually. No fieldwork is what I heard."

Madani laughed. "Yeah, not looking forward to explaining all of this to Hernandez, even if we did take down someone under my jurisdiction."

The space blanket around Karen's shoulders crinkled as she reached out a hand to touch the edge of Madani's. "We should work together again sometime."

"Good for you, was it?"

Karen grinned and even under the ghostly floodlights of the crime scene, her face lit up like sunshine. "Hell, yeah."

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, it's not a MCU Netflix universe without Turk showing up!


End file.
